Tayah Turocy is an alumna from Wadsworth, Ohio. She graduated in May of 2018 with a degree in chemical engineering and minored in chemistry and mathematics. 

Recently, Tayah was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program “recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees. The fellowship aims to select recipients that will achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers.” By receiving the fellowship, Tayah is fully supported by the National Science Foundation for the remainder of her graduate school career. 

Tayah is currently a third-year chemistry student in Jason Crawford’s lab at Yale University. As a member of the chemical biology institute, she is able to use chemistry and biology research methods to study host bacteria interactions. Her research experiments vary from genome engineering to mammalian cell assay. 

Tayah’s research is on Colorectal cancer, which is the third most diagnosed cancer in the United States with nearly 50,000 annual deaths. She utilizes probiotics to develop colorectal cancer prevention techniques and inflammatory bowel disease treatments. Further, these studies may open a future innovative avenue for bringing precision microbiome editing from an academic concept to clinical use. 

The NSF fellowship period extends over five years. Fellowships provide the recipient with a three-year annual stipend as well as professional development opportunities including internships. Tayah will remain funded by the NSF GRFP until she graduates in the spring of 2023. 

After graduating with a chemistry Ph.D. from Yale, Tayah hopes to pursue research and use her skill set towards other chemical biology applications like diagnostic tools. Although she loves completing experiments at her lab bench, Tayah is passionate about helping others through her scientific research.